by Nigel Jones
One who did accept Brooke’s invitation was Virginia, who came for a five-day stay. Chastely she slept on the opposite side of the house from Brooke’s quarters. Both were busy at their respective literary labours – Virginia was revising the text of what became her first novel, The Voyage Out, and writing reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, while Brooke was hard at work on Webster, and also writing and polishing his poetry. Virginia drew a portrait of the poet at work – biting his pencil, trying out words and lines aloud; and altogether giving the impression of a dedicated professional poet laboriously hewing art out of hard stone. ‘His feet were permanently bare,’ Virginia recalled in 1918 of her visit to Grantchester, and:
he disdained all tobacco and butcher’s meat, and he lived all day, and perhaps slept all night, in the open air … Under his influence the country near Cambridge was full of young men and women walking barefoot, sharing his passion for bathing and fish diet, disdaining book learning and proclaiming that there was something deep and wonderful in the man who brought the milk and in the woman who watched the cows.
Despite her terror of sexuality, Virginia was evidently willing to flirt with Brooke, who thrilled her on one hot moonlit night by suddenly proposing: ‘Let’s go bathing quite naked.’ She remembered the erotic occasion all her life – and privately told her friends how impressed she had been when Brooke performed his instant-erection trick. One mutual friend who saw Virginia after her visit – E. M. Forster – recorded in his diary: ‘I shall see the goat [Virginia] today and hear how the Rupert romance is going on. She told me that he said he did not want to marry for several years at any rate but did want to copulate occasionally and promiscuously.’
Brooke was pursuing his project as outlined to Virginia with some enthusiasm. He was definitely lining up Ka as a future sexual partner, and – unknown to all his friends – Elisabeth van Rysselberghe had re-entered his life. Still entranced by Brooke, she had arrived in England ostensibly to improve her English, and was boarding with a clergyman’s family in Teddington. The lovers’ reunion took place in the Italian room at the National Gallery. But it was hardly the romantic idyll of which she had dreamed. Brooke was typically both callous and indecisive – at one time telling Elisabeth to book rooms for a dirty weekend, the next admitting that he was tired, confused and unable to decide what he really wanted to do. Unsurprisingly, Elisabeth was offended by his attitude and rejected sleeping with him on the cold terms he envisaged. But they continued to meet occasionally in London until she returned home in the autumn.
While Elisabeth had ruled herself out of the running, and Ka had to be played like a particularly lazy trout, Brooke had other amorous fish to fry – in particular Noel, with whom his endless game of emotional chess continued. She too could blow hot and cold, in late May writing: ‘sometimes I hate your seeming to be in love with me, because you dont realise sufficiently how beastly I am, in most ways …’ – which had the predictable effect of rousing his ire: ‘Oh! Damn you! If people in love are blinded to the other person’s real nature, I too am certainly not in love. For I see plainly that you’re a codfish.’ But he still danced to his young lover’s tune, writing covertly to her in mid-June: ‘Centre of the world, We are all sitting in the window of the Old Vicarage, for it’s raining. Ethel [Pye] & Daphne [Olivier] opposite me: Hugh [Popham] to one side. But they don’t know who I’m writing to. I read your letter during lunch, under the table …’ After arranging to meet her fleetingly in London he concluded: ‘Oh, I’m so keen to be seeing you again. You’re very lovely & very kind & very good.’
Frequent forays to London were a feature of Brooke’s summer, but his heart was increasingly in Grantchester. ‘Oh, it is the only place, here,’ Noel was told at the beginning of July.
It’s such a nice breezy first glorious morning, and I’m having a hurried breakfast, half dressed, in the garden, & writing to you. What cocoa! What a garden! What a you! And oh! damn! I’ve got to go into Cambridge & fetch out a punt for Dudley & his German women [Clothilde and Annemarie von der Planitz] … who are coming for the day. Damn them. Fetching a punt, entertaining them, & taking the punt back – there’s a whole day gone. And I wanted to work.
Brooke revealed that he had just spent two days in London, seeing Diaghilev’s legendary Ballet Russe, with Nijinsky as the principal performer. He was so enchanted with its glories that, as with Peter Pan, he became a serial attender, notching up 15 visits by the year’s end.
But somehow, despite his grouchy complaints, Brooke went on attracting visitors to Grantchester as iron filings to a magnet. Among them was the 19-year-old Bunny Garnett, who has left a vivid account of his stay:
One of the first things I noticed was a photograph of Noel in a silver frame on the table … Rupert could not have been more delightful. He was quite free from airs of superiority, which it must have been difficult to avoid with such a half-baked creature as myself. And he was quite free, also, from any affectations such as I noticed later. Instead he was easy, and kind, and hospitable, and yet happily preoccupied with his own work.
As soon as he arrived Bunny was honoured, too, with a midnight dip:
We went about midnight to bathe in Byron’s pool. We walked out of the garden of the Old Vicarage into the lane full of thick white dust, which slipped under our weight as we walked noiselessly in our sand-shoes, and then through the dew-soaked grass of the meadow over the mill-wall leading to the pool, to bathe naked in the unseen water, smelling of wild peppermint and mud.
During Bunny’s stay there was a farcical episode involving Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, the homosexual don who had been one of Brooke’s earliest Cambridge mentors. Invited to the Old Vicarage for dinner, ‘Goldie’ had stopped en route for a nude bathe. A puntload of young ladies happened along, and moored themselves between the unseen don, who had concealed himself in reeds, and his clothes. He was forced to wait while the party held a lengthy picnic, getting colder and colder and sinking deeper into the mud. He eventually arrived at the Old Vicarage caked in Granta ooze. A solicitous Brooke hurried off for blankets and hot milk to restore his patron’s dignity and circulation.
As the summer reached its height, still the stream of visitors ran relentlessly on: Lytton Strachey came over from Cambridge for lunch; Geoffrey Keynes dropped by – he was fruitlessly pursuing Ka, and had commissioned a portrait of her by Duncan Grant, another visitor to the Old Vicarage. Grant painted in the summer house, leaving behind a clutch of pictures that remained forgotten until they were discovered in 1919. Other visitors included Maynard Keynes, Justin Brooke and Gerald Shove. Brooke’s star was burning as brightly as ever, and attracting other planets to its fiery wake.
14
* * *
You and You
* * *
By the scorching July of 1911, as Britain’s constitutional crisis simmered to boiling point, with the Tory Lords dividing into two factions – the ‘hedgers’, who were prepared to compromise and surrender to the government; and the ‘ditchers’, who wished to fight to the end – Brooke realized that his own life had come to a crossroads.
He saw that his long pursuit of Noel Olivier was getting nowhere, and that he was, however unwillingly, falling into some sort of love with Ka Cox. In the meantime he continued a parallel pursuit of both – inviting them to visit him at the Old Vicarage. But it was Ka who succumbed to a series of pleas like this: ‘You must come this weekend. Then we’ll talk: and laugh … Come! and talk! And love me – a little.’ For Ka’s edification he compiled one of his lists of ‘the best things in the world’:
(1) Lust
(2) Love
(3) Keats
(4) Weather
(5) go
(6) Truth
(5½) guts
(6) Marrons glacés
(7) Ka
(29) Rupert.
Ka was tempted, like many others, by Brooke’s picture of the joys of his bucolic existence: ‘There is no wind and no sun, only a sort of warm haze, and through
it the mingled country sounds of a bee, a mowing machine, a mill, and a sparrow. Peace! And the content of working all day at Webster. Reading and reading and reading. It’s not noble, but it’s so happy. Oh, COME here!’ Cautiously – and chaperoned by James – Ka met him in London for a performance of Scheherazade. He followed this up with more wheedling: ‘Come. We’ll be wholly frank! If you don’t understand quite – nor, you know (don’t tell anyone) do I. We’ll explain and discuss, discover and guess, everything. Pride’s irrelevant. Come! … O my dear, we’ll, in any case, be so intimate, so damned intimate … You must come this week-end. Then we’ll talk: and laugh. You’ll have thought by then. Oh, come, come! …’
But Ka remained obstinately as elusive as Noel, for her family ties loomed large and she refused Brooke’s urgent invitations in favour of looking after an aged aunt in Manchester. Playing hard to get always had the effect of further inflaming his passions, and he let loose a torrent of imploring adoration that cannot have left Ka in any doubt of his awakening feelings – which had been further exacerbated by a visit from those cooing newly-weds Jacques and Gwen Raverat that had left him ‘drooping in front of the Old Vicarage and very sentimental and jealous’.
He felt he had only Ka’s enveloping maternal warmth left to turn to:
Oh! Why do you invite responsibilities? Are you a cushion, or a floor? Ignoble thought! But why does your face invite one to load weariness on you? Why does your body appeal for an extra load of responsibilities? Why do your legs demand that one should pin business responsibilities on them? Won’t you manage my committees? Will you take my soul over entire for me? Won’t you write my poems? …
He makes it clear that he is in need of just the kind of support that only Ka can provide: ‘Oh but I want to see you. Just now I’m scribbling this merely to say that I think you’re the most lovely and splendid and superb and loved person, Ka.’ In spite of the gradual peeling off of his friends into separate pairings – which left him, he confessed ‘mourning and moping’ – Brooke still saw himself as the ringmaster of the Neo-Pagan revels, a combination of squadron leader and spiritual guru: ‘So I must meet you and we’ll settle each other’s business. I’ve got the rest off my hands! I’ve told Jacques about Marriage and Dudley about Women and Gwen about Babies and James about Wisdom, and I’ve brought Cambridge up to the level in European culture. Now for you! Besides …’ he ended dolefully, ‘we’d mitigate each other’s loneliness.’
Finally, Ka caved in to this sustained emotional bombardment and spent two days at the Old Vicarage, sleeping, like Virginia, on the Neeves’ side of the house. It wasn’t quite the quality time alone that Brooke had promised – there were visits from Lytton Strachey, Lowes Dickinson and the Cornfords – but it was enough to confirm Ka’s growing place in his heart.
Ka further entrenched herself in Brooke’s affections by her homespun skills – noticing the paucity of his wardrobe, she sewed him a series of shirts. As unconventional in her own dress sense as Brooke, with her tight bodices and full skirts, and with her long, brown hair bound in a gypsy scarf, she artlessly showed off her ample charms. She accepted her role as repository of practical wisdom among the Neo-Pagans with quiet assurance, as her friend and love rival Gwen Raverat noted: ‘Ka, where’s the best place to buy sofa cushions? – Please, this Arab costume is too small for me, will you make it longer so that I can go to the Slade dance? – How does one send a parcel to Germany? – What do tortoises eat? …’ All these and many similar questions she answered easily in the soothing, deep voice that many men appear to have found both reassuring and sexy. For, despite looks that could have been plain, Ka had no shortage of suitors among her male friends. They appreciated her unassertive emancipation and – not least – the inherited wealth that gave her financial freedom and independence.
And not only men – Ka attracted as many women friends, including Virginia Stephen, who got to know her at this time. Meeting Ka in January, by Easter Virginia felt close enough to her to contemplate a joint holiday, valuing her ‘brightness’, ‘niceness’, ‘intelligence’ and her ‘trusty stable goodness’. She drew a pen portrait of Ka: ‘Bruin going her way – with a beaver’s tail and short clumsy paws … Ka came steadily along the road in time for lunch yesterday, with a knapsack on her back, a row of red beads, and daisies stuck in her coat.’ But Ka’s gentle passivity and lack of guile could – and did – land her in trouble. In her own way, despite her need to be needed, she was as unable to reciprocate Brooke’s stormy emotions as Noel. This reverse side of her nurturing coin was at first hidden from him. When it gradually appeared it first exasperated him – ‘[She’s] like a vegetable,’ he jeered – but later, fatally, it was to estrange him.
For now, however, he needed her more than she him – he was the supplicant and she the object of his dawning love. After her Grantchester visit he teasingly told her that they were becoming an item in the gossip of their friends:
Ka, They’ve been talking, about You and Me. Talking! Awful. If you only knew what James said Virginia said So and So said! … these mediate ignorances!! But your repper [reputation], my dear, is going. Oh, among the quite Advanced. I, it is thought, am rather beastly; you rather pitiable … Isn’t it too monstrous? They gibber night and morning, teleogically. ‘How will it end?’ They impudently ache for us. There are, you must know, only two ‘endings’ for this or any other case. (1) Marriage (2) Not. (1) is entirely good (2) entirely bad … They live for the future like puritans and judge by the end like parsons. Is there no SIGN to give them, that each minute is final, and each heart alone?
While appearing to ridicule the wagging tongues, Brooke was slyly validating what he hoped would become an affair, if not marriage. By teasing Ka with what people were saying about them, he was subtly suggesting that they should play out the roles their friends had already cast them for.
But where did this leave Noel and their ‘engagement’? In mid-July Brooke visited the Oliviers at the house where they were staying in Rawlinson Road, Oxford, conveniently combining it with research on the Elizabethans at the Bodleian Library. Writing to Noel to arrange the trip, a harassed Brooke – ‘working like a steam-roller’ – let slip two pertinent pieces of information: ‘a man has expressed a morose desire to print my poems immediately’ and, perhaps of more interest to Noel:
Ka comes from Newnham every day & we read Bergson together. I’ve got very fond of her. But as she’s got a lot of old-fashioned and silly prejudices, the only thing they’ll allow her to do is to marry & have children, & as she’s very old … [Ka was four months older than Brooke, and hence 24 at the time of writing!] she’d better, I discovered, not waste time on me: she doesn’t seem to be able to attend to two people at once. So woman. I must go & work …
If this was meant to reassure Noel, it was expressed with typical insensitivity and awkwardness. She responded with both sense and sensibility:
Rupert, darling! [a uniquely fond endearment coming from the cool Noel] … I wish you wouldn’t call Ka ‘bloody’; she isn’t, & it sounds as though you were angry with her; you have no cause to be … Oh, it would have been so much better, if you had married her ages ago! And you told me, once, that you could be very rich (& support a huge wife & family) if you wanted to. Perhaps you don’t want to tho’[.] Love from Noel.
His knuckles duly rapped, Brooke turned his attention in August, as he entered his twenty-fourth year, to the other topic he had mentioned to Noel: the publication of his first collection of verse. E. J. Dent having rejected the chance of bringing out the book, he had turned to another young publisher, Frank Sidgwick, who, knowing of Brooke via Lytton Strachey, had met him at his London office in mid-June and read the poems while on his honeymoon. The canny Sidgwick issued the traditional warning that poetry did not pay, but offered to publish the collection, provided Brooke stood guarantor against a probable loss on the venture. As the Ranee had already offered to subsidize the publication out of her pocket, Brooke gave the necessary assurance and sig
ned the contract for the book in mid-August, with Virginia Stephen as his witness. He would receive a royalty of 15 per cent on every copy sold.
Frantically, Brooke set to work to knock his poems into shape. His major production of the year so far had been ‘The Fish’ – a long poem full of aquatic imagery that was a sort of wet run for his famous ‘Heaven’, a brilliant satire on religious belief in immortality. His poetic labour was witnessed by his friend and fellow-poet Frances Cornford: she said he made composition ‘feel more like carpentering’ – a hard physical effort. ‘Sitting on the floor (he said he “couldn’t think rhythmically sitting up”) biting the end of his pencil, and jotting notes in the margin … he would say, without looking up “I like that” or “That’s good.”’
Frances was one of the many who fell for his still irresistible charm:
There was something dateless in his beauty which makes it easy to picture him in other centuries, yet always in England … It was a continual pleasure to look at him fresh each day – his radiant fairness, beauty of build, his broad head with its flung-back hair, deepset frowning eyes. The clear line of his chin and long broad-based neck on broad shoulders were so entirely beautiful that he seemed like a symbol of youth for all time … To watch him putting on his boots, frowning and groaning, with the absorbed seriousness of a child, with which he did all practical things – he would look up with a pink face and his pleasant hair tumbled and his sudden sharing grin which always had the loveliness of a child’s.
